On Feb. 14th, Will Cooke of Canonical announced that Ubuntu 18.04 will have data collection features added to it. My questions are:
- What is the LinuxMint team's viewpoint on this?
- Will the team use the 18.04 LTS as the base for the next release of Mint or will they switch to another base distro?
- What are the opinions of the community members?

Personally, I think its a terrible idea in the realm of betrayal of trust. There are reasons why I choose and recommend Mint vs. the raw Ubuntu. Privacy is a big part of it.
Below are some URLs to the relevant information. Please understand that this is not an attempt to stir-up or spread controversy.

Just imagine the blow back one will encounter in discussions about Linux. As soon as we cite the privacy issues of Win 10, any clown within a google search will counter that point with Will Cooke's mail-list post, and the OMG Ubuntu article where they clearly are trying to make it seem like its no big deal. Worse is if I get someone to try Linux and I bring up privacy issues only to have this data collection mess be thrown back at me a few weeks/months down the line. It will look like I intentionally tried to mislead them.